Reflections on the Importance of Indigenous Geography

Editorial: The right to assert the order of things in the city

“…The ephemeral nature of the ontological turn in Geography is well explicated by the quote from Herman (2008) in the conclusion. 2 Foucault's (2010, 4) framework for understanding the focal point of human subjective experience includes 1. thought (forms of possible knowledge), 2. behavior (normative frameworks of behavior) and 3. being (potential modes of existence).…”

“…. [Herman 2008;Springer 2018]), at the boundary of Worldview and the order of things established therein. As participation in structurally unjust systems like Liberal Democracy finds its limit in the structurally unjust order of the system (one can participate in Liberal Democracy, but one cannot disturb the hierarchical, domineering order of things that forms the foundation for Liberal Democracy and its legal system), the right to the city finds its limit at the point in which the order of things desired and asserted by sovereign subjects and the state apparatuses through which sovereign power is enacted are disturbed.…”

“…The city's complexity-especially as it pertains to invisible, intangible variables like emotions and ideas that cannot be quantified-is to be simplified to the point that the city can be known from what, following Herman (2008), can aptly be described as the materially rationalist 14 epistemological perspective of the Colonial Modernist Worldview. The city is reduced to a state in which it can be known in the materially rational terms of Colonial Modernity so that the 'people and things' of the city can be 'known and mapped'.…”

“…1 Many expressions of the ontological turn in the modernist academy ought to be considered ephemeral in unproblematically accepting the reduction of reality to the material world of passing time and physical space, to the 'real world out there' (Herman 2008;Blaser 2013). The ephemeral nature of the ontological turn in Geography is well explicated by the quote from Herman (2008) in the conclusion.…”

“…assumption that the visible world of manifest facts-'the real world out there'-is more real than the invisible, unmanifest world of ideas emotions, forms etc. (Needleman 1975;Nicoll 1998;Herman 2008;Blaser 2013). As such, this editorial explores the ideational continuities and discontinuities (Foucault 1972) of the articles assembled in this issue through an overtly nonlinear, nomadic perspective that is rooted in the Worldviews and associated conceptions of order that articulate the invisible lines of ideational continuity and discontinuity that run through the articles.…”